Thursday, September 30, 2021

the last book I ever read (I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year, excerpt twenty-four)

from I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year by Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker:

Chris Christie called the White House intending to tell Trump, “Are you crazy? What are you doing? You’re the president of the United States . . . You’ve got to stop this.” But when Trump didn’t take his call, the former New Jersey governor went on TV and tried to deliver his message to the president through the screen.

“I’ve been spending the last twenty-five minutes or so trying to get the president on the phone myself to say this to him directly,” Christie said during ABC’s breaking news coverage. “The president caused this protest to occur. He’s the only one who can make it stop. The president has to come out and tell his supporters to leave the Capitol grounds and to allow the Congress to do their business peacefully. And anything short of that is an abrogation of his responsibility. He spoke to this crowd, his son spoke to this crowd, and sent them on their way. I don’t know that they anticipated this was going to be the result, but it doesn’t matter whether they did or they didn’t. This is the result of their words, and now their words must put a stop to this.”



Wednesday, September 29, 2021

the last book I ever read (I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year, excerpt twenty-three)

from I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year by Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker:

A little before 2:30, D.C. mayor Muriel Bowser’s homeland security director launched an urgent conference call connecting the mayor, Contee, Sund, and Walker. Top staff working for Army secretary Ryan McCarthy dialed in from across the river. Sund joined the call in progress and told the two army lieutenant generals working under McCarthy that his officers were in a dire crisis and needed help immediately. But the McCarthy aides, Walter Piatt and Charles Flynn, who coincidentally was Michael Flynn’s brother, sounded reluctant. Piatt said he didn’t like the “visual” of National Guard members standing sentry in front of the Capitol, and he would prefer Guard soldiers take up posts elsewhere around the city to relieve D.C. police so police officers could instead respond to the Capitol. As they both stood over a desk phone set on speaker, Flynn concurred with Piatt, saying it would not be his military advice to McCarthy to deploy the Guard without a plan. Flynn would later seek to conceal that he was on the call; when he ultimately admitted he was part of the discussion, he said he could not recall exactly what he had said.

Contee, who by that point had already sent more than one hundred of his officers to help the Capitol Police, was stunned. Sund was pleading for help. He had just told Piatt and Flynn that armed rioters had breached the Capitol and that shots had been fired inside the building. And they were talking about optics and planning duty assignments.



Tuesday, September 28, 2021

the last book I ever read (I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year, excerpt twenty-two)

from I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year by Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker:

Outside the Capitol, the pro-Trump protest was quickly morphing into a battle scene. Demonstrators so outnumbered law enforcement that hundreds of Capitol Police officers on the western front of the complex had no chance of holding the crowds away from the grounds. They retreated to create a tighter blockade around the Capitol’s grand external balconies and steps, all with the goal of keeping people away from the immediate building. This was no ordinary political protest. It was a riot. Many of those crashing through the outer barricades were wearing military gear, carrying Trump flags, and some were wielding pipes, batons, and cans of bear spray as weapons. A few had climbing gear, and some even brought night goggles and fire-retardant gloves. Some engaged in hand-to-hand combat with the police officers, who chose not to fire on the crowd for fear of triggering gruesome violence.

By 12: 58, Sund knew his officers were getting slammed and they wouldn’t be able to stop the onslaught shoving its way toward the halls of Congress. He needed to declare an emergency and call in reinforcements. He called the House Sergeant at Arms, Paul Irving, requesting he and the Senate Sergeant at Arms, Michael Stenger, approve the emergency declaration and call in the National Guard immediately. Irving said he would get back to him after “running it up the chain,” presumably getting approval from Pelosi and Mitch McConnell.



Monday, September 27, 2021

the last book I ever read (I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year, excerpt twenty-one)

from I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year by Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker:

Trump was not only stirring chaos on social media and calling his supporters to the streets. On January 2, the president called Raffensperger to repeatedly coerce Georgia’s secretary of state to “recalculate” the statewide vote tally to put him on top. It was an egregious abuse of power, legal scholars said, and possibly a criminal act.

“All I want to do is this,” Trump told Raffensperger. “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state.”

Trump repeated his request: “So what are we going to do here, folks? I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break. You know, we have that in spades already.”

On the call, which was arranged by Meadows, Trump was rambling and at times nonsensical. He alternately berated and flattered Raffensperger, who along with his office’s general counsel, Ryan Germany, tried to explain to the president that his assertions were based on debunked conspiracy theories and that Biden’s 11,779-vote victory in Georgia was fair and accurate.



Sunday, September 26, 2021

the last book I ever read (I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year, excerpt twenty)

from I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year by Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker:

Flynn’s former military colleagues thought they were long past being shocked by his bizarre behavior after he joined Trump’s campaign and his administration. He had taken money from the Turkish government while seeking a White House job, lied to the FBI about his conversations with a Russian ambassador on his fourth day as national security adviser, and then claimed prosecutors had coerced him to falsely admit to lying. But on December 17, the military brass he used to work alongside were floored anew when the retired lieutenant general asserted in a television interview that Trump had won the election, and urged him to seize the voting machines and declare martial law if necessary to “rerun” the election.

In his Newsmax TV interview with Greg Kelly at about 4:00 that afternoon, Flynn said there was precedent for deploying military troops for this purpose when in fact there was none.



Saturday, September 25, 2021

the last book I ever read (I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year, excerpt nineteen)

from I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year by Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker:

Cipollone, a prudent lawyer, hung back. Though generally a fan of Haspel’s, he let Pence do most of the talking in the meeting. Trump ultimately decided that day to put his Patel plan on ice and keep Haspel in her position.

Down the hall in the chief of staff’s office, Meadows told Haspel he had offered the deputy CIA director job to Patel. She was unaware that the president had originally planned to do exactly this and that he had just decided against it. Haspel made clear that she would resign noisily rather than let Patel become her number two.

“I won’t stand for that,” Haspel told Meadows. “I’d like to then tender my resignation to the president himself.”

Before it came to that, however, Trump had backed off the idea of replacing Haspel.



Friday, September 24, 2021

the last book I ever read (I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year, excerpt eighteen)

from I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year by Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker:

Giuliani elevated a protégée, Jenna Ellis, thirty-six, who had worked on the Trump campaign’s legal team. Ellis had a high opinion of herself. “I’m the Cinderella story of the legal world,” she told The Wall Street Journal. She marketed herself as a constitutional law expert, though her experience in that realm was largely limited to self-publishing a book in 2015, The Legal Basis for a Moral Constitution, in which she argued that the Constitution was designed on the foundation of the Judeo-Christian worldview and that our rights come from God, not government. She had worked as a deputy district attorney handling court violations in a Colorado county but was fired, and later worked at the conservative law firm Thomas More Society, where she represented churches in religious liberty cases. Before December 2020, court records showed that Ellis had not handled an election law case nor appeared in a federal district court, where constitutional matters are weighed.

With Giuliani’s blessing, Ellis walked through Trump campaign headquarters telling people they had to answer to her if they wanted to keep their jobs and must no longer take instructions from Stepien or Clark, the campaign manager and deputy campaign manager, respectively. She sent text messages to others saying the same thing. Rank-and-file staffers were shaken by what was happening; one quietly complained to Jason Miller and said, “Hey, Jenna’s going crazy.” Ellis said this account of her conduct, described by other campaign officials, was “completely false.”



Thursday, September 23, 2021

the last book I ever read (I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year, excerpt seventeen)

from I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year by Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker:

Meanwhile, there were other Trump efforts afoot to influence the outcome in Georgia. On November 13, Lindsey Graham called Raffensperger in what the secretary of state considered a pressure tactic to get him to help overturn the results by improperly tossing out some legally cast ballots. Raffensperger later told Amy Gardner of The Washington Post that Graham had echoed Trump’s unfounded claims that Georgia had numerous voting irregularities. He said Graham questioned Georgia’s signature-matching law and whether political bias could have prompted poll workers to accept ballots with signatures that didn’t match voter registration records. He said Graham also asked him if he had the power to toss out all mail-in ballots for counties found to have higher erates of nonmatching signatures, a suggestion that shocked Raffensperger. Graham denied that he had proposed tossing legally cast votes and claimed he was only trying to understand the signature-matching law and process.



Wednesday, September 22, 2021

the last book I ever read (I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year, excerpt sixteen)

from I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year by Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker:

Ezra Cohen-Watnick was one of three Trump loyalists who had been installed in senior roles at the Pentagon on November 10. Cohen-Watnick, thirty-four, who would later go by the name Ezra Cohen, denied saying anything negative about Milley. He had been named acting under secretary of defense for intelligence, which gave him control of the military’s intelligence and counterintelligence operations. At the start of the administration, he had been hired onto the NSC by Michael Flynn and was controversial for both his hawkish ideology and his bureaucratic knife-fighting, as well as for being accused of sharing intelligence reports with his former boss, Congressman Devin Nunes, which Cohen-Watnick had denied. CIA officials complained about working with him. After just seven months on the job, he was pushed out by Flynn’s successor, H. R. McMaster. The national security adviser had tried unsuccessfully to remove Cohen-Watnick earlier that year, but later got important backup from Kelly, who had just begun as chief of staff and had received his own warnings aobut the aide from intel officials. Cohen-Watnick later served as national security adviser to the attorney general Jeff Sessions and then in a pair of Pentagon jobs that did not require Senate confirmation.

As part of a broader shakeup, Tony Tata, sixty-one, was tapped to perform the duties of the under secretary for policy—even though his nomination for that position has previously crumbled when not enough Senate Republicans would support it. Now he was performing the job without Senate confirmation. A retired army brigadier general, Tata had been a frequent guest on Fox News and promoted conspiracy theories, including falsely claiming that President Obama was Muslim and a “terrorist leader,” and that the CIA had sought to assassinate Trump.



Tuesday, September 21, 2021

the last book I ever read (I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year, excerpt fifteen)

from I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year by Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker:

Esper was a lifelong Republican and had worked at the conservative Heritage Foundation as well as for Republican senators Bill Frist and Chuck Hagel. But he told his closest colleagues that as he watched TV news anchors cover the election results, he found himself rooting for the Democrat. Esper had worked with Biden and his secretary of state in waiting, Antony Blinken, when he was a senior staffer on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He had confidence that they were serious, stable people who cared deeply about shoring up national security. Esper couldn’t say the same about Trump. In fact, Trump had privately indicated he would seek to withdraw from NATO and to blow up the U.S. alliance with South Korea, should he win reelection. When those alliances had come up in meetings with Esper and other top aides, some advisers warned Trump that shredding them before the election would be politically dangerous.

“Yeah, the second term,” Trump had said. “We’ll do it the second term.”



Monday, September 20, 2021

the last book I ever read (I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year, excerpt fourteen)

from I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year by Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker:

“What’s happening in Michigan?” he asked.

They said it was too early to tell, votes were still being counted and they couldn’t say.

“Just say we won,” Giuliani told them.

Same thing in Pennsylvania. “Just say we won Pennsylvania,” Giuliani said.

Giuliani’s grand plan was to just say Trump won, state after state, based on nothing. Stepien, Miller, and Meadows thought his argument was both incoherent and irresponsible.



Sunday, September 19, 2021

the last book I ever read (I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year, excerpt thirteen)

from I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year by Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker:

The next morning, October 1, Hicks woke up feeling the same, so instead of rushing into work at 7:30 a.m. as usual, she went back to sleep, hoping to kick the bug, whatever it was. At about 11:00, she went into the White House to take her daily COVID test. The rapid test was positive, so she then took a more reliable PCR test. She got the results shortly after noon. Positive again. Hicks had COVID-19.

She immediately went home to self-isolate and informed Mark Meadows and other key officials about her diagnosis. Word spread quickly among White House staff, who were alarmed because of how much time Hicks spent around Trump and the seniormost members of the administration. Some staffers suddenly started wearing masks around the White House. Trump was scheduled to depart around 1:00 p.m. for another campaign fundraiser at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey. Meadows and other aides scrambled to change the flight manifest. Kayleigh McEnany had been scheduled to travel to Bedminister but was pulled from the trip because she had been in close contact with Hicks. Deputy press secretary Judd Deere traveled in her place.

Trump and Meadows did not want Hicks’s diagnosis to become public, and the president carried on with his New Jersey trip, where he was slated to raise $5 million for his reelection. The decision to proceed with the fundraiser after the president’s extended and recent close contact with an infected person flouted both the CDC recommendations and the advice the White House gave its own staff. What’s more, Trump himself wasn’t feeling well after sounding hoarse the night before. He could be a vector.



Saturday, September 18, 2021

the last book I ever read (I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year, excerpt twelve)

from I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year by Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker:

The Gold Star event the night of September 27 honored the families of fallen service members. Trump gave formal remarks about the Gold Star families in the East Room and then mingled privately with many of them. As with all White House guests who met the president, the Gold Star parents were first tested for the coronavirus and did not disclose any symptoms.

As soon as the reception ended, Trump complained to some of his advisers about having been close to the Gold Star families, a concern he had not had about mingling with Republican officials and friends celebrating Barrett’s nomination a day prior.

“You guys are letting people entirely too close to me,” the germaphobe president said. “It’s so sad, these Gold Star families are telling these stories, they’re weeping, they’re crying, they want to hug you, and they’re all over me. You guys should not let these people close to me. They’re way too close.

“If they have COVID,” Trumpe added, “I’m definitely going to get it.”



Friday, September 17, 2021

the last book I ever read (I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year, excerpt eleven)

from I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year by Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker:

On July 30, President Trump proposed delaying the election, such was his fear of losing. He did not have the power to do so, but nevertheless tweeted, “With Universal Mail-in Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???”

The suggestion was laughable. The dates of presidential general elections are determined by the Congress, with power enshrined in Artlcle II of the Constitution. Since 1845, federal law has set the Tuesday after the first Monday of November as the date of the election. In 2020, that would be November 3. No president in history has ever successfully delayed an election, not even in times of war.



Thursday, September 16, 2021

the last book I ever read (I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year, excerpt ten)

from I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year by Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker:

Among those who tested positive for coronavirus after attending the rally were Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt and former presidential candidate Herman Cain. Stitt, who complained of feeling achy mostly, recovered. He insisted he had not contracted the virus at the president’s rally, although he, like most attendees, did not wear a mask at the rally. Cain, also maskless at the rally, fell ill a few days later. He was soon hospitalized with COVID-19 and died on July 30.



Wednesday, September 15, 2021

the last book I ever read (I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year, excerpt nine)

from I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year by Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker:

A bigger shoe dropped the next day, June 3, when Trump’s first defense secretary, retired Marine Corps General Jim Mattis, finally went public with his disdain for the president. Mattis had long insisted it would be improper for him to criticize a sitting president, but after seeing military personnel on the scene as officers forcibly cleared peaceful protesters at Lafayette Square, he decided he had a duty to speak out.

“Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead, he tries to divide us,” Mattis wrote, also in The Atlantic. “We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership.”



Tuesday, September 14, 2021

the last book I ever read (I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year, excerpt eight)

from I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year by Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker:

On May 31, as protestors took to the streets in Washington for the third day straight, The New York Times reported that Trump had been taken to the bunker two nights earlier. The report, which was confirmed by other outlets and replayed heavily on cable news, infuriated the president because he thought it made him appear scared and weak. Trump demanded to know who had leaked this news to Maggie Haberman and Peter Baker of the Times. He told Mark Meadows, “Mark, you have to catch whoever leaked that. They should be in prison. They should be tried for treason. This is treasonous!”

“I’m on it,” Meadows said. “I’m on it.”

The bunker story would become an obsession of the new chief of staff’s—and he would spend hours pursuing possible leads on the identity of the leaker, through the release of this White House gossip didn’t constitute a crime and Meadows’s fixation got in the way of his job managing the entire executive branch. Meadows would tell other aides that he suspected the leak originated from the first lady’s office, but he would never uncover solid enough evidence to make a convincing case.

A few days later, Trump would deny what had happened. “It was a false report,” Trump said in a call-in interview with Fox News Radio’s Brian Kilmeade. “I went down during the day, and I was there for a tiny, little, short period of time, and it was much more for an inspection.”

Trump’s risible explanation was a lie. His aides knew it. His Secret Service agents knew it.



Monday, September 13, 2021

the last book I ever read (I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year, excerpt seven)

from I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year by Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker:

On May 7, at Barr’s direction, the Justice Department did a 180-degree turn and tossed out the prosecution of Flynn on the recommendation of a special prosecutor Barr had appointed to reinvestigate the case. To the president’s delight, Barr concluded that the lies that Flynn told to FBI agents and denials about his conversations with a Russian ambassador were not a crime because there was no official investigation under way at the time. This was another brutal affront to the line prosecutors working the Flynn case, and fresh evidence that Barr intervened to show mercy when the defendants were Trump allies. The day of the new filing, Trump applauded Flynn as “an even greater warrior” and called the senior FBI and Justice Department officials who pursued him “human scum.”



Sunday, September 12, 2021

the last book I ever read (I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year, excerpt six)

from I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year by Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker:

In the May 1 briefing, despite promising to never lie to reporters, McEnany proceeded to repeatedly stretch the truth. She misrepresented what FBI records showed about agents’ strategy before their famous interview with then national security adviser Michael Flynn. She claimed Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation cost taxpayers $40 million; it had cost $32 million. She claimed the Mueller probe resulted in “the complete and total exoneration of President Trump”; in fact, the Mueller team concluded there was substantial evidence that the president obstructed a criminal probe and that they could not exonerate him. The actual words of the report’s conclusion said: “while this report does not conclude that the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”



Saturday, September 11, 2021

the last book I ever read (I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year, excerpt five)

from I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year by Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker:

On April 28, the White House resistance to masking came to a head when Pence flew to Rochester, Minnesota, to tour the Mayo Clinic. He visited with patients and staff and toured facilities at the renowned medical center that were supporting COVID-19 research, but did not wear a mask, a violation of the Mayo Clinic’s policy. Video of Pence’s maskless interactions, including greeting a patient in bed, went viral. Here was the chair of the coronavirus task force flouting a hospital’s policy, not to mention the CDC’s recommendations. Everyone else in the video clips wore masks.

Pence at first defended his decision not to wear a mask, saying he was tested for the virus regularly. “Since I don’t have the coronavirus, I thought it’d be a good opportunity for me to be here, to be able to speak to these researchers, these incredible health-care personnel, and look them in the eye and say, ‘Thank you,’” Pence said.

Two days later second lady Karen Pence would claim on Fox News that her husband hadn’t known about the mask requirement until after the clinic visit. But that wasn’t the full truth. Pence’s staff did know the policy. The Mayo Clinic tweeted on its official social media account, “Mayo Clinic had informed @VP of the masking policy prior to his arrival today.” The tweet was soon deleted, after Marc Short yelled at clinic officials for attempting to embarrass the vice president and for drawing media attention away from the convalescent plasma research Pence had flown to Rochester to promote.



Friday, September 10, 2021

the last book I ever read (I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year, excerpt four)

from I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year by Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker:

“So, supposing we hit the body with a tremendous, whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light, and I think you said that hasn’t been checked, but you’re going to test it,” Trump said. “And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do, either through the skin or in some other way. And I think you said you’re going to test that, too. Sounds interesting, right? And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning, because, you see, it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that.”

Birx, seated alongside the podium, looked uncomfortable and slightly distraught as Trump mused about injecting a household disinfectant such as bleach into the human body. She smirked at first and then stared down, trying to keep a straight face. She later told confidants she felt as if the earth had swallowed her up. This cannot be happening, she thought to herself. It was not in Birx’s DNA to stand up and yell, “This is not a treatment! Do not inject bleach!” So Birx sat silently, declining to correct the president. She was, after all, an army doctor—a “chain-of-command gal,” as she liked to tell people—and Trump was her commander in chief.



Thursday, September 9, 2021

the last book I ever read (I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year, excerpt three)

from I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year by Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker:

Through late March and early April, the president heard a steady drumbeat of anecdotal testimony that the untested, antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine could treat COVID-19. The evangelists in his ear ranged from Rudy Giuliani to Ingraham, who, with Meadows’s help, arranged to bring doctors who were regular on-air guests on her Fox show to the White House for private meetings with Trump to talk up the drug.

Hydroxychloroquine was still in the testing stages and not yet approved by the FDA as a treatment for COVID-19, although doctors were permitted to prescribe it to hospitalized patients. Medical professionals believed it had dangerous side effects, and Fauci privately pleaded with the president to be more cautious about advocating the drug. But Trump, who famously said he trusted his gut more than anything an expert could counsel him, was so desperate to make the virus disappear that he pitched the drug as “a very special thing.”



Wednesday, September 8, 2021

the last book I ever read (I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year, excerpt two)

from I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year by Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker:

The president was furious at the CDC, and his primary reason was not that it created a contaminated and malfunctioning COVID test that took weeks to fix, not that America lacked enough tests that could have traced and controlled the spread. He was angry because the CDC had created a political problem for him by agreeing to create a test for the virus in the first place. Barely missing a beat, the president spun to another topic.

“Larry Ellison called me. He tells me remdesivir works,” Trump said. “So get the FDA to approve it today. And Laura says chloroquine works as a cure. So the FDA has to approve it also.” He was referring to the Oracle founder and to Laura Ingraham, the Fox News Channel host.

Azar, still a little punch drunk from the testing conversation, explained the FDA didn’t do same-day approvals of drugs or therapies and that it would have to conduct studies to make sure the drugs were safe.

“Larry, he’s the smartest person I know,” Trump said. “He says it’s safe. Get it approved.”



Tuesday, September 7, 2021

the last book I ever read (I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year, excerpt one)

from I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year by Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker:

Biegun opened with what he and the group thought would be a basic overview of the effort to bring home diplomats and permanent residents, as well as protections to ensure the evacuated Americans didn’t spread the virus after returning. The president wanted to know how many people. Biegun estimated it would be several hundred right away, and eventually could be a couple of thousand.

Trump exploded.

“We’re not letting them come back,” he said. “You risk increasing my numbers. You won’t increase my numbers.”

Trump didn’t want sick Americans landing on U.S. soil, even if they were working for the State Department, or else the government would have to report a rise in infections, and that would make the public—the voters—nervous. The president was always thinking about the political ramifications for himself, even during a crisis.



Saturday, September 4, 2021

the last book I ever read (Truman by David McCullough, excerpt twenty-four)

from Truman by David McCullough:

The “major achievement of his latter years,” wrote Osborne, was “a rare one of its kind, and it has a place in the story of our time…. At the age of 74, in the bright winter of his life, Harry Truman is a genuinely happy man.”



Friday, September 3, 2021

the last book I ever read (Truman by David McCullough, excerpt twenty-three)

from Truman by David McCullough:

“I shall not be a candidate for re-election. I have served my country long, and I think efficiently and honestly. I shall not accept a renomination. I do not feel that it is my duty to spend another four years in the White House.”

It was said without buildup, almost matter-of-factly, and for a few seconds the immense audience sat silent and confused. Then followed a strange mixture of automatic applause and shouted cries of “No,” even from some of those who had hoped he would step down. “I found myself shouting ‘No’ with vigor,” recalled Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who had tried to stop Truman’s nomination in 1948. “Then I wondered the hell I was shouting ‘No,” since this is what I had been hoping would happen for month. Still the shouts of ‘No’ seemed the least due to the President for a noble and courageous reununciation.”



Thursday, September 2, 2021

the last book I ever read (Truman by David McCullough, excerpt twenty-two)

from Truman by David McCullough:

They were all the same, familiar faces around him—Charlie Ross, Matt Connelly, Harry Vaughan, Charlie Murphy, Bill Hassett, George Elsey, William Hopkins—with one addition, the author John Hersey, who was wriing a “profile” of the President for The New Yorker and had been given permission to follow him trhough several working days, routine working days presumably. (It was unprecedented access for a writer, but Hersey had appealed to Truman on the grounds tha what he wrote might be a contribution to history).

Truman paused. The room was still. The shock of what he had said made everyone sit stiff and silent. Everything that had seemed to be going so well in Korea, all the heady prospects since Inchon, the soaring hopes of Wake Island were gone in an instant. As Hersey wrote, everyone present knew at once what the news meant for Truman, who would be answerable, “alone and inescapably,” for whatever happened now in Korea. The decision to go beyond the 38th parallel had been his, just as the decision to risk the Inchon invasion had been his. Only this time the results would be different.



Wednesday, September 1, 2021

the last book I ever read (Truman by David McCullough, excerpt twenty-one)

from Truman by David McCullough:

In the early house of September 15—it was afternoon in Washington, September 14—the amphibious landing at Inchon began. As promised by MacArthur, the attack took the enemy by total surprise, and as also promised by MacArthur, the operation was an overwhelming success that completely turned the tables on the enemy.

The invasion force numbered 262 ships and 70,000 men of the Tenth Corps, with the 1st Marine Division leading the assault. Inchon fell in little more than a day. In eleven days Seoul was retaken. Meantime, as planned, General Walker’s Eighth Army broke out of the Pusan Perimeter and started north. Seldom in military history had there been such a dramatic turn in fortune. By September 27 more than half the North Korean Army had been trapped in a huge pincer movement. By October 1, U.N. forces were at the 38th parallel and South Korea was in U.N. control. In two weeks, it had become an entirely different war.